Food start-ups are challenging the border between food and not-food. Anyone care for a nutrition bars with crunchy crickets?

I saw the future of food at a start-up competition in San Francisco. I ate algae, crickets, and seaweed. I met Willy Wonka. And I am now convinced we’re embarking on a quest to redefine edibility itself.

What can we eat? Deformed fruit? Brown-green seaweed? Biotech concoctions of “new edible materials?” As long as it’s edible, tasty, and safe, who says we can’t eat bugs or weeds?

The competition, FoodBytes, started off on a somber note: world hunger, the obesity epidemic, soil degradation, climate change. These issues are real. The UN even estimated that farmers will have to produce 70% more food to feed the nine billion human beings populating this small planet by 2050.

The most exciting start-ups rose to these challenges by combining science, nature, and art. They redefine edibility by producing food from stuff that isn't that food: Shrimp made from algae, pasta made out of seaweed, cheese made from plants, energy bars made with carrots or dried crickets.

It’s Not Shrimp, but It Is Shrimp

Photo: Courtesy of New Wave Foods

Dominique Barnes, the CEO of New Wave Foods, explained Shr!mp (with an exclamation mark) this way: “It’s not shrimp, but it is shrimp.” She wouldn’t explain the ingredients, other than to say they’re concocted from a plant-based protein powder and red algae. Shr!mp are vegetarian, kosher, and far easier on the environment. Shrimp have ten times the carbon footprint of cattle, generating something one journalist called a “turbid, pesticide- and antibiotic-filled, virus-laden pond.” Gross.

I wanted to like the not-shrimp shrimp, but it was difficult. True, it didn’t taste like shrimp. Also true, it didn’t taste like something I would choose to eat—kind of rubbery, kind of fishy. Even with the salty breading, Shr!mp tasted like nuggets of shrimp aspiration.

Is It Pasta?

Photo: Courtesy of Seamore

Next up was Seamore, a seaweed pasta company based in Amsterdam. Willem Sodderland, the founder, promised to feed the world one billion servings of seaweed by 2030. He looked a little like Willy Wonka, so I believed him.

When I tried Seamore, I decided it was a good seaweed salad: sesame seeds, cilantro, shredded carrots, a light sesame oil. It just wasn’t a good pasta salad. Seaweed is very different from pasta—one is marine algae, the other is unleavened flour dough.

Seamore reminded me of zucchini noodles and spaghetti squash and all the other not-pastas that will never, ever be confused with pasta. They’re just vegetables cut into strings. Cauliflower “mac” and cheese deserves the quotation marks. Don’t get me wrong—it’s all tasty. It’s just not pasta.

But Sodderland promised us a lot more with a hint to his next product: A “special kind of seaweed that, if you fry it, it turns into bacon.” And this is real! Researchers at Oregon State patented this magic seabacon last year. It’s a red macro-algae called dulse. The court is still out on whether dulse tastes good but one researcher described as a “God’s vegetable": healthy, sustainable, tasty-ish.

A better option was pasta made from something that wasn’t seaweed.

Photo: Courtesy of Banza

Banza was featured on Generation Start-Up, a new documentary screened for Obama’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit, Silicon Valley’s version of who’s who of the start-up world. I had high hopes for Banza, a super healthy pasta made out of chickpeas. I took a box home and added some magic: Kraft macaroni and cheese mix. Everything tastes better when smothered in butter and orange cheese powder.

Did it still taste ever so slightly of boiled hummus? Perhaps. So I added more butter and I still felt smug about how healthy I was. To be fair, though, I set an impossibly high standard. Nothing can compete with Kraft.

Bars from Crickets

Photo: Adrienne Rose Johnson

I like the idea of eating crickets. They’re high protein, low impact, and, apparently, contain 15% more iron than spinach. Sort of Jiminy-meets-Popeye.

Pat Crowley, the founder of Chapul, markets his product as the “original cricket energy bar.” You can buy the bars at health/alternative food stores, online, at gyms, at some Whole Foods locations. But also at three 7-Elevens in Fort Collins, Colorado? Whoever is in charge of Chapul’s distribution is really good at their job.

Each Chapul cricket bar flavor is inspired by a world cuisine that already uses insects, like the Mexican dish of chapulines, or fried grasshoppers commonly sold in Oaxaca as a snack or in tacos. Or the Thai influence derives from larb mote dang, or “red ant egg salad” made from ant eggs, green onion, and peppers. CNN called it “Thailand’s most underrated dish” and explained that since red ants eat mango leaves, their bodies taste like a “squirt of lime.” Just like grass changes the flavor of beef, different kinds of feed change the flavor of the crickets. When Crowley fed his crickets jalapeño-spiked oats, the crickets took on a spicy-hot flavor.

All the crickets taste the same for now. Cricket’s naturally bland, nutty flavor is a tough sell even without crazy flavors.

I tried the Thai bar, flavored with coconut flakes, ginger, dates, and, of course, cricket powder. The flavors were mixed up Jungle Juice-style and I could only taste sweet, kind of mushy coconut. Not bad and I got to feel that foodie adventurousness vibe, like Anthony Bourdain in a bar.

Bars from Carrots

The other bar on the menu at the start-up competition was theSaladBar, marketed as the way to “make vegetables taste good.” A full serving of vegetables compressed into a 1.76 oz. bar. I declined the kale quinoa flavor and chose carrot spice, an earthy mix of cashew butter, hemp protein, carrot powder, dates, and quinoa. It tasted damp.

Give me a cricket bar any day. Carrots already taste good on their own without being dried into powder and masked with dates and cashew butter. Crickets, on the other hand, I prefer pulverized. If we’re going to fry, mash, dry, preserve, or process anything, I say we stick to the gross things that need to be unrecognizable to be edible. Carrots don’t need to be powdered up; crickets most definitely do.

Dairy-Free Cheese

Imperfect Produce

Photo: Courtesy of Imperfect Produce

An estimated 40% of food is wasted in the United States. Throwing away spoiled leftovers is one thing, but some 20% of produce is rejected because it doesn’t meet grocery store’s aesthetic standards. We expect our fruits and vegetables to be blemish-free, perfectly shaped, and evenly colored.

Despite the appeal of a perfectly round, red apple, strict cosmetic standards generate a lot of waste—like six billion pounds of wasted product. A start-up called Imperfect Produce stepped in to rescue those ugly fruits and vegetables and sell them straight to consumers at a significant discount.

Ben Simon, the CEO of Imperfect Produce, has big plans. He said the “pickiness on the end of the consumer” is changing quickly. The 25-35 demographic is keenly aware of the environmental toll of food waste, he said. These trendsetters are ready to embrace curvy, wonky, polka-dotted fruits and vegetables, especially if they’re cheaper.

Boxes of Imperfect Produce (roughly a $1/pound) are now available only in Northern California, but Simon hopes to change that soon. You can read more about his mission here.

What is the difference between food and waste? Why do we classify some stuff as food and other stuff as gross, halfway-edible nastiness? Sure, taste is an important factor. We have every right to choose Kraft over hummus pasta or refuse a plate of seaweed because it tastes like salty mud.

But maybe the future of this planet will depend on our culinary bravery, our open-mindedness to try new things, as gross as they might sound.

Adrienne Rose Johnson is a lecturer in American Studies at Stanford who writes about food, popular culture, and dieting.